


brown hair bleeding

by maybejanie



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Again, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bella assumes Alice's gender, Bisexual Jacob Black, Demisexual Edward Cullen, Edward Cullen Needs a Hug, Edward has a nuanced perspective on religion/the afterlife, Eventual Romance, F/F, F/M, Gay Emmett Cullen, Jasper Hale was a Union spy, Jasper is the cishet white man on thin fucking ice, Lesbian Leah Clearwater, M/M, Misgendering, Mutual Pining, Nonbinary Alice Cullen, Pansexual Carlisle Cullen, Slow Burn, Trans Esme Cullen, Trans Female Character, also there aren't people who smell 'better' to them than others, blatantly ignoring the fact that the books were set in the early 2000s, blood is blood, brief misgendering, i made a us government fancast specifically for this fic, i may or may not make this spicy, i mean i don't think it'll actually come up in the fic but it's there in my head, idk if that'll come up, in this house we acknowledge bella swan's intelligence, lesbian rosalie hale, no i am not sorry, no seriously, so Edward only wants to kill Bella as much as he wants to kill everyone else, ty for absolutely nothing stephanie meyer, yes i redid jasper's entire backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:08:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29570814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybejanie/pseuds/maybejanie
Summary: Bella knows that the Cullens have a secret- one they're desperate to protect. And as responsible as she's always been, she still has a small impulse control problem.(Based on a twilight renaissance post I saw on Instagram about how Bella should have blackmailed Edward, and also just me writing the most self-indulgent version of twilight I could come up with)
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale, Carlisle Cullen/Esme Cullen, Edward Cullen/Bella Swan, Jacob Black/Emmett Cullen, Leah Clearwater/Rosalie Hale
Kudos: 3





	1. Bella

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the title of the fic is from Flightless Bird, American Mouth which is one of my favorite songs in the first Twilight movie. I thought it was kind of funny, so here we are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so this was written to a playlist of what I think the Twilight soundtrack would have sounded like in 2021, and I will link it at some point that is not rn. To tide you over, I was listening to Grace, Sky Full Of Song, and Big God all by Florence + The Machine while writing this first bit.

It's raining when Bella comes to Forks. This isn't surprising, because in Forks it's raining all the time except for when it's snowing instead. She tries to convince herself that this will be okay, that she can get through two measly years before she goes off to college somewhere warm and sunny, but she's never been particularly persuasive.

Really, she's pretty boring. All of the girls in Arizona had seemed vibrant and _alive_ in a way that Bella never has been. She likes books and sunlight and taking care of people, but there's always been something fundamental missing, something that's supposed to make her shine. Not brighter than anyone else, but shine differently. All of those other girls had it. Bella doesn't understand why she doesn't. 

"Did you eat lunch, Bells?" Charlie asks, in that steady voice he has. He doesn't sound uncomfortable or nervous but she knows that he is.

She knows because his fingers are tapping against the steering wheel of the patrol car and his shoulders are just a little drawn up. Maybe, she thinks, she could banish the trembling from her voice if she'd had as much practice as him. It could be her goal, for the next two years, to hide the anxiety as well as he does. Would he feel weird if she asked for lessons? 

"Not yet."

He glances at the clock on his dashboard. It's 3:37, so the implication that she'd been _planning_ on eating falls flat. "That's okay. We can swing by the diner. Would you rather eat there or get takeout?"

"Takeout," She says, relieved that he gave her the choice. "I just want to unpack, if that's alright."

Charlie smiles. "Okay." 

He surprises her with a truck, and she eyes the bed, imagining all of the hiking gear she can fit in the back. She may be uncoordinated, but she doesn't have _too_ many problems with walking, so hiking is the only one of her mom's many adventure activities that stuck. She likes it. It was something she could do on her own, even if her mom flaked on their plans, and it catered heavily to her need to manage everything. Preparation is really the key to hiking- water, food, and trails have to be planned meticulously in advance, especially in the middle of an Arizona summer, when it can get up to 120 degrees. 

"This is amazing, Dad!" 

He seems surprised, like he was sure that he would have to talk her into liking it, but it looks indestructible and that's really what matters. She pulls her phone out of her pocket right then to look up hiking trails nearby, leaving the search results to comb through later.

She spends all weekend unpacking her things. She'd paid a fortune to ship all of her books to Forks, but she's ultimately glad that she did. Charlie helps her clear off the bookshelf in the living room that just kind of looks sad, filled up with fishing magazines and pictures of her. She wants to move it into her room, but quickly realizes that there's not a lot of space. She'll just have to keep her books downstairs. It takes her hours to get the books how she wants them, organized by genre and then by size. 

It feels nice to be able to control this little piece of her life here. Back in Phoenix, she had a setup in her bedroom that consisted of old milk crates stacked in weird shapes against one wall of her room. It made her feel a bit like she was a struggling author, scraping by doing ghost-writing work for a trashy romance author. Here it was an old bookcase with swinging glass doors that she was fairly certain had belonged to her great-grandma Swan. It made her feel like she was a rich widow from the 1940s, writing self-indulgent poetry that she burned every night in a drunken fit of loneliness. 

The second time that Charlie suggests going to the diner, she asks him if she can take over the grocery shopping and cooking. He agrees readily, and she really needs to go on a hike soon because she's feeling restless enough to venture out to the grocery store alone. 

Her hair, which is usually just this side of wavy, is already damp from the light drizzle of rain when she makes it inside the store. She ties it up in a ponytail just to get it off of her neck and starts to get all of the items that were on her grocery list back home. There's a laugh that sounds like windchimes and then a girl, around her age, floats around the corner of the aisle. She's pushing an empty shopping cart, and with her is a boy who looks like he'd rather be anywhere else. He's running a hand through messy auburn hair and he's _pretty_ , okay? He's _really fucking pretty_. 

Bella goes back to trying to find the right kind of pasta. She doesn't know why, but her grandma's pasta salad just tastes better when she uses radiatore. It's a useful trick to keep herself from looking back to the teenagers talking in muted tones on the other end of the aisle, because this grocery store apparently doesn't carry radiatore. She's disappointed, because she's craving pasta salad and maybe it would make her feel more at home. She sighs, pouting at the shelf of pasta, and pulls out her phone. It's wishful thinking, but she checks to see if an Amazon delivery would get here by the end of the weekend. She has no luck, but she orders the pasta anyways. She'll make it next week, to congratulate herself for surviving three days at Forks High School.

 _"Alice, what the fuck?"_ Bella tries not to jump or whip her head around to stare, she really does. She can't help it though, and she looks straight into the honey-colored eyes of the little waifish girl who was apparently called Alice. 

"Oh." She says softly. "You've decided to stay then."

Bella's eyes widen, then flit over to the boy who isn't looking at her, and then back to Alice. "Excuse me?"

"You're Bella, yes?"

Bella nods. 

"I tried not to think about you as long as I could."

Bella turns back to the pasta. She can't deal with whatever this is, even if the boy is pretty and the girl looks like a fairy. She has two years of a life to grit her teeth through and a list of groceries to buy, but she can't resist looking back over her shoulder at them. The boy is looking at her, eyes the same shade of gold as the girl's were. 

And suddenly, Bella feels like she's _sparkling_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the first part, complete with a different first meeting! And btw, I know full well that there is no reason for Alice and Edward to be perusing the local grocery store but I have a perfectly good explanation that will come later


	2. Edward

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I was listening to evermore by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver and also Creature Fear by Bon Iver and Seventeen by LEON while writing this mess

The worst part about reading minds was that it was boring most of the time. Like, everyone is unique and all that but most of the time, people are not thinking their _unique_ thoughts. Especially not while they're grocery shopping.

Edward really hates it at the grocery store, but Alice loves it. Their visions have gotten more vivid and faster over time, and they like dragging him to the grocery store to see who can guess what someone is going to do first. The visions are supposed to come as soon as a decision is made, and that's theoretically the same time that Edward hears them think it. Sometimes he can guess before they make the decision, but people make their decisions differently. They could have already decided to buy a bag of chocolate before they came into the store, and as soon as Alice focuses on them they can tell that they're going to get the chocolate, but Edward would have no idea because they haven't thought specifically about the chocolates yet. Some people just do things based on instinct, which doesn't always translate directly into thought. 

He doesn't think about the mechanics too much.

"What about her?" Edward asks, gesturing to a teenage girl looking at pasta before he reaches out to hone in on her thoughts. Everyone thinks differently, too. Not always in terms of content, but some people think in pictures and some think in sentences and some think in ideas. The intensity of thoughts also varies, so at first he just thinks this girl thinks quietly. It takes him a few moments to realize that he just can't hear her.

He wonders if she's sleepwalking, but quickly discounts that theory. She doesn't have that glassy look in her eyes. In fact, her sky-blue eyes are sharp and clear and narrowing in disappointment. 

He's been trying so hard to hear this girl that he doesn't notice that Alice is having a vision until they're basically out of it, shivering slightly beside him. And then he sees flashes- not the entire vision like he usually does because it's already over and because they're trying suspiciously hard not to think about it. It's him, and it's the girl at the end of the aisle, and there's a blur of white noise and forest, and then it's the girl again but her eyes are the same golden hue that his are right now.

_"Alice, what the fuck?"_ He hisses it out, like he's trying to hurtle the vision back at them.

The girl turns around, eyes impossibly wide. He can't look at her, he won't. Somehow this girl is tied to him and that fact is going to steal the very breath from her lungs and he's already feeling guilty for something that hasn't happened yet, something that could be anyone else's fault in the world.

"Oh," Alice says, and he sees what they're thinking just a second before they say it. In their head, they follow the thread of the vision back to the choice that made it tangible. "You've decided to stay then."

Edward knows what they're not saying, that it must have happened while Alice was with him because she doesn't look at this girl's set of futures when he's around to see them. He's angry. Alice has been keeping something big from him, and now he doesn't know what he's supposed to do with what he knows.

"Excuse me?" And this girl's voice is the gentlest thing he's ever heard, like she's talking to a small animal or maybe just a feral one. 

"You're Bella, yes?"

Bella fits her. It's soft the whole way through, just like her voice. He can't reconcile either one with the intense eyes that keep darting his way.

"I tried not to think about you as long as I could." There's an apology there, and he would know what Alice is saying sorry for even if he couldn't read their mind. They protected Bella for as long as they could, and now Edward is probably going to do something stupid for reasons that Alice won't even let him see. 

He looks at her again, finally, when she turns around. _She's just going to leave?_ Alice knew her name and said some weird cryptic shit and this girl is walking in the other direction, no pasta in her grocery cart. She's going to leave the store. She turns back before she does, and he is hit with the full force of those blue eyes. For a second, he feels like he's standing in the sunlight, warm and content and blazing. And then she's really gone, like the sun ducking behind a cloud.

_"Alice, what the fuck?"_ He repeats, like he even needs to. He can hear the discomfort and slight remorse swirling in their head. It's going to be a hell of a car ride home. 

Jasper knows there's something wrong the second they walk through the front door. 

"What did you do?" His Southern drawl is charming most of the time. Right now, it makes Edward want to throw him through a window because he's looking at Edward like any of this is _his_ fault, which it is not. 

He frowns at Jasper. "I didn't do anything. Your boyfriend had a vision."

Strictly speaking, Alice is nonbinary, but they think it's funny when Jasper- who considers himself straight- calls them his boyfriend since Alice's name and clothing choices are generally seen as feminine. They've approved it for family use, although Jasper is still the only one who uses it regularly. 

"What did you see?" Jasper has his war-face on now, and if Edward could blush he'd be doing it now because it's going to be really embarrassing when he finds out that Edward's riled up over a human with pretty eyes that Alice thinks is going to be one of them someday. "What's coming?"

Alice pats his arm like they're an old married couple. "It's nothing bad. Edward's just mad because I've been keeping it to myself for a couple days."

Edward deflates a little. It's only been a couple of days, at least. 

"Oh, so it's about Bella Swan." Jasper says calmly.

"You knew? I get Alice keeping it from me, but how did you-"

Jasper smirks. "I just made myself feel _really_ boring whenever you were around."

Sometimes he feels like an outsider in this house. Alice is his best friend but it's not the same as what they have with Jasper, thank God, and Rosalie and Emmett are arguably closer than Alice and Edward. It's stupid, because he should feel livid with them for ganging up on him like this, but instead he just feels so unbearably lonely.

"Hey, you okay?" Jasper's eyes, according to his own account, had always been a warm and syrupy brown. They're probably harder now, but Edward can still feel the warmth sometimes. Maybe that's just Jasper's emotional manipulation.

He snaps out of it. They can't think around him, but he can't feel around Jasper. It had been humbling when he joined their little family. "I'm fine. Will you guys please tell me what's going on?"

"I saw Bella a couple days ago, when she boarded the plane to Washington. She's Chief Swan's daughter, I think, or closely related to him. She's living with him for now. There wasn't anything clear enough to see before that, probably because she hadn't really decided definitively to come until she actually got on the plane. In the past few hours, she must have made up her mind to stay. That was the last choice she had to make before I could see all the possibilities clearly."

"And?" He prompted. "What does she have to do with me? Why did you see her becoming one of us?"

Alice glances at Jasper, who looks a little surprised. "Well, I didn't know about her becoming one of us until today. I couldn't see that far before. It's not the only future for her, but it's the strongest right now. The only reason I saw her at all is because she had some sort of connection to you. I can't really see what that is, though. I'm sorry I can't tell you more, but for some reason things around her are blurry for the moment, moreso than usual. I can tell that she's made the decision to stay, but there must be something else that needs to happen before the vision narrows into something I can sort through."

It's not a satisfying explanation, but Edward will take what he can get. Maybe he messes up, maybe he tries to kill this girl who is shut away from him and stops himself in time to let her turn. Maybe she almost dies another way, and it's the only way to save her and he has to do it. He doesn't think he's strong enough for either of those scenarios. Maybe it'll happen like Emmett and Rose, and he'll finally get to be close to someone the way that he's always wanted.

He thinks maybe he can accept that, if he saves her and she turns out to be a kind of family. 


	3. Bella

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone wants to beta this garbage fire, pls let me know. I've just been writing and posting, no betas, no spellcheck, nothing  
> Uh, also we're not doing the whole 'she's not like other girls and every guy is obsessed with her' bc if you wanted to read that, you'd just read twilight. So prepare yourself for out of character Mike Newton, movie Jessica, book Angela, and no Eric bc I don't remember a single thing about him. Plus the whole thing about everyone judging the Cullens was weird, and since I lived in a town smaller than Forks I think I can safely say that most of the students wouldn't have been so judgy. Adults, maybe, but not too many of the kids  
> And I hate the whole weird 'perfect white skin' thing that smeyer had going on with Bella so my Bella has freckles and skin texture and she gets breakouts okay!!

Bella's first day at Forks High School was leaving _a lot_ to be desired. The school was just a cluster of buildings spanning across an acre of poorly-maintained grass and connected with cracking pavement. There was nothing that could have made her more uncertain of her decision to come here.

Her classes will be easy, at least. Forks has very limited AP options, and none of them correlate to the classes she had already started in Phoenix. It's ridiculous, really, how much of a breeze her last two years of high school will be, but it also worries her. Even if she looks past the fact that she's going to be very bored here, there is always the question of how this is going to effect her college applications. It'll do absolutely nothing for her weighted GPA, and her lack of extracurriculars is already bad enough. She'll barely pull off getting a partial scholarship to U of A at this rate. 

Maybe she should join a club or run for student council or start a charity. At the very least, she needs a job.

"You're Isabella Swan," A girl with honey-colored highlights and big, dark eyes says. Bella is in English and she has already read everything they're going to be discussing for the rest of the year, most of it back in the first two years of high school. 

She can't do anything but wince and nod. "You can call me Bella."

"Okay, then, Bella. You're from Arizona." 

It's slightly off-putting, how she doesn't ask questions, she just states facts. 

"Yeah." And okay, Bella is aware she's not the stereotypical 'Arizona girl'. No matter how much time she spends outside, her skin never does anything but burn or freckle and her hair is just barely light enough to still be considered brown. 

The girl flicks a lock of heat-damaged hair over her shoulder. "I'm Jessica. Just a word of warning, some of the guys are probably going to throw themselves at you for the first couple of weeks. If you tell them to fuck off, they'll leave you alone."

"Why would they-"

Jessica raised an eyebrow. "Because, Bella, you're hot and you don't know how lame they are yet because you're new." 

Bella can't even begin to unpack all of that. "I'm not-"

"If you're about to tell me that you're not hot, I'm going to drop kick you across the room. I'm sorry if you've never had someone to lay it all out for you before, but you have me now."

Bella doesn't argue, mostly because she wants this conversation to be over. Jessica's sterile assessment of her physical appearance makes her stomach roll. She's never been particularly good at taking compliments, and even though she's never really thought too much about how much she appeals to other people, it makes her feel sticky. 

"The best part about this is that I get to watch a bunch of boys fall over themselves to ask you out. What class do you have after lunch?"

"Biology." She gets the feeling that everything will be easier if she just goes along with Jessica. 

"Ugh, I hate science. I'm personally more of a history person. Are you in the honors class with Mr. Banner?"

"Yep."

Jessica smiles. "Cool. My boyfriend, Mike, is in that class too."

They go to lunch together, and they're a little late because Bella forgot her money for lunch. Mike, a boy with charming dimples and shaggy blonde hair, waves them over to a table close to the center of the cafeteria. It's ten minutes into the lunch period when another girl at the table starts getting jumpy.

"Why does Edward Cullen keep looking over here?" She hisses under her breath. Bella has no idea who she's talking about, so she just keeps eating her sad excuse for a chicken salad and flipping through the English syllabus again. "It's making me antsy."

Jessica digs her elbow into Bella's shoulder. "I think he's staring at you."

Bella hums, not really interested in another one of those 'lame boys' that Jessica was telling her about. She's trying to think of novels she could read for the final paper, because the suggested list is just as new to her as the rest of the curriculum. It's supposed to focus on a social issue, and she's been meaning to read another Toni Morrison novel ever since she finished Song of Solomon, so she starts pulling up her Wikipedia page.

"Arguably the hottest guy in Forks- don't even fight me on this, Angela, I will not take constructive criticism from a girl whose favorite Cullen is _Carlisle_ \- is literally boring hole in the back of your head and you're looking at, what?"

Bella finally looks up, but keeps her unimpressed gaze on Jessica. "Um, a list of Toni Morrison novels."

"Right. Whoever that is. The Cullens are like the only sexy or mysterious thing about Forks, and one of them is _hardcore staring_ at you right now."

She sighs and turns to sweep her gaze across the cafeteria, trying to look casual. Except she sucks at acting, and Edward Cullen is apparently none other than the boy from the grocery store. 

"Oh. His sister said something weird to me at the grocery store on Saturday. She might have been high."

Jessica winces. "You mean Alice, the little one?"

Bella nods. 

"Alice isn't Edward's sister, just his sibling. They're nonbinary."

"Okay." Bella says carefully, not really sure how small town Forks was. "Thanks for telling me before I misgendered them to their face."

"Honestly, that's probably not going to be an issue. They all kind of keep to themselves."

That's when Bella notices the other three people sitting around the lunch table. "They're all related?"

"I think Rosalie and Jasper are twins, and Edward and Alice are siblings too, but they're all foster kids. Technically, Rosalie, Emmett, and Jasper are eighteen already but they've been with the Cullens for a long time. That would be Carlisle and Esme. Carlisle is a doctor and Esme is like the most badass architect ever. When they first moved here a couple years ago, everyone thought it was weird because Alice and Jasper are together and it was kind of assumed that Emmett and Rosalie were too, but Rosalie was totally at that Port Angeles Pride festival last summer and she had the lesbian flag painted on her cheek so I think she's into girls."

Bella smiles. She's always kind of known that she's pansexual but she's only ever come out to her mom and it hasn't really mattered because she was always too busy to _really_ get invested in someone. "Okay, so Rosalie is the blonde girl, Jasper is the boy sitting by Alice, and Emmett is the one who looks like he could snap someone's neck?"

"Passed the quiz with flying colors," Mike says cheerily. He doesn't seem bothered that Jessica has been talking about how attractive another guy is, which makes Bella feel a little more safe at this table. All of them are just so _solid_ in a way that Bella hasn't really seen a lot.

Jessica sighs impatiently. "Anyways, the point is that Edward is like the most anti-social of them all and he apparently can't take his eyes off of you."

Bella rolls her eyes. She's not going to look at him because she's a little scared of meeting his gaze, and even more frightened that she won't. "He's probably just zoning out or looking at something behind me. It's not a whole thing."

Jessica looks like she wants to kill her. 

"So," Angela says, in an obvious but not unwelcome attempt to change the subject. "What do you think of Forks so far?"

"It's definitely not what I expected." That much, at least, she can say truthfully.

The end of lunch comes too soon. Bella finds that she's actually enjoying herself. Jessica, Angela, and Mike are already better friends than any she had in Phoenix and she can see herself being reasonably content in Forks, even if the fears about college are still in the back of her mind.

Mike walks her to Biology and introduces her to the teacher, Mr. Banner. He's nice enough, but she gets a very subtle vibe from him that sets her teeth on edge. She walks stiffly to the only empty lab table. Mike offers to ditch his friend to sit by her but she just shakes her head.

"I think I can survive one class period, Newton."

He relents and goes to sit in his usual seat. The stool beside her remains empty until seconds before the bell rings, when none other than _Edward Cullen_ strolls into the classroom, looks at her, freezes, and then sits down at the lab bench. She tries not to think about it too much. He's just another boy who happens to be attractive and who might have been staring at her for an entire half hour. 

"Hello," He says quietly, but his voice is razor-sharp. 

She knows she sounds breathy when she replies with a hasty, "Hi."

Bella really wants to ground to swallow her whole. 

"I'm Edward."

"Bella."

Mr. Banner takes attendance and starts his lecture about the phases of mitosis. It's not hard to let her mind focus on the droning of the teacher's voice instead of how close Edward's forearm is to her fingertips. She's good at this, at making her brain narrow in on the details instead of having to ever look at the big picture. 

The class ends without much fanfare, and Mike is at her side before she's done putting her things into her backpack. "We have gym next."

Bella groans. "Kill me now, please. In the long run, you'd actually be saving the rest of the class from being put in mortal danger by my lack of coordination."

"You can't be that bad."

She levels Mike with a hard look. "I can. I really, really can."

Bella doesn't even glance over her shoulder as she leaves the classroom and she's a little proud of herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I ventured into the Twilight Wiki instead of re-reading the books and-  
> WHO WAS GOING TO TELL ME THAT BELLA'S BIO TEACHER CANONICALLY HAD A CRUSH ON HER?????? WTF WAS SMEYER THINKING????
> 
> I wish I was joking


End file.
